5th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology and the 2nd International Wildland Fire Ecology and Fire Management Congress

Tuesday, 18 November 2003: 10:45 AM
Numerical simulations of fire behavior in the presence of vertical wind shear
Philip Cunningham, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL; and R. R. Linn and J. Reisner
Poster PDF (466.0 kB)
The effects of vertically sheared winds on the behavior of wildland fires are examined via simulations of a coupled atmosphere-fire model. Specifically, the HIGRAD/FIRETEC model developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is employed to explore the dependence of fire behavior and fire plume dynamics on the nature and magnitude of the low-level environmental wind shear. Both circular and line ignition sources will be considered. In addition, the generation of coherent vortical structures associated with the interaction between the sheared environmental winds and the fire-induced flow will be examined, along with the effect of these vortical structures on the fire behavior.

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